Friday, March 11, 2016

Gross
inequalities in health across populations have been recognized for centuries. With modern health systems these inequalities
can be measured in great detail. The
disadvantage experienced by black Americans is one of the best studied and most
important inequalities in the US. For
example, death rates among black Americans have been 50% higher than for whites
ever since vital statistics data were first collected in 1900, and life
expectancy is 4 years shorter. Despite
the vast recounting of this experience, and the many interventions – most often
on a small scale - that have been mounted to reduce the health gap, we can at
best point to only modest progress in the last several decades.

There is
no mystery lurking below the surface here – health is determined by where we
group up, the school we attend, what job we hold, and our access to a secure
and health-promoting life style. What is
all too often missing from this story, however, is a recognition of the vital
importance of active, organized institutional racism within our society. Discrimination against people of color cannot
have gone undetected by anyone who lives in this society, or even the casual
visitor from abroad. Yet while
discrimination is all too apparent in our daily experience - in residential
segregation, police violence and the grossly skewed patterns of employment -
just how the institutions of our society give racism its enormous impact as a living
social force is often invisible. No
doubt historical practices of racism gain momentum on their own, and are passed
down through collective behavior. That
alone, would not be sufficient to maintain the impregnable barriers to racial
equality that have been with us for 500 years of US history. For the 300 years when
that institution took the form of chattel slavery racism not only saturated
every aspect of life in the US, it was applauded and fanatically defended; a
“second revolution” and the deadliest war we have ever fought was required to
bring down that barrier. Racial history since 1864 has been one of great progress,
yet with continuity. Our challenge today
is to understand the much more complex structures that continue to limit life’s
chances for people of color. Understanding
and confronting this reality is not a dry academic exercise; it is a life or
death challenge faced by millions of our friends, work-mates and neighbors
every day. More. Racism is a poison that
seeps into the interstices of every social domain – wreaking havoc on our
cities, undermining the political will to support public education and insure
that all employment offers a living wage.
Our founding document, still honored as a literal handbook for the
operation of government, proclaims as a self-evident truth that “all men are
created equal”. The original sin of our
society was yielding to the temptation to the vilest hypocrisy – defining “all men”
and “equal” to mean precisely the opposite.
The pretense of moral authority enshrined in that document has granted
us license to live a lie. Yet you reap
what you sow and, while perhaps not self-evident to the founding fathers, no
matter what their skin color or ethnic background, “all men” - and women – have an unalienable will to assert
their demand for equality. We continue
to pay dearly for the choice to our build society on a foundation of injustice.
Illness and death have no respect for
pretense. Health inequalities demonstrate
an inescapable truth about the state of justice and equality in our
society.

The goals of this blog are 3-fold:

1) To explore the structure and way of
operating of those institutions that constantly rebuild, extend and modify the
barriers to racial equality.

2) To illuminate
how those institutional practices rob black Americans and other minority groups
of their good health.

3) To generate an
urgency, a “fire in the belly” outrage, that will move us all to fight racist
institutions, their practices, and the people who promote them. Only by taking up these challenges can we expect
to win in the struggle against the immense power that racism wields in our
society.

Friday, March 4, 2016

Dr. Dmitriy Dligach, a newly hired assistant professor at the
computer science department at the Loyola Lakeshore Campus, will present a
seminar titled "Semantic Analysis of Clinical Texts” on March 8th for
our department at the conference room. The abstract is also attached.
Before he joined Loyola in January this year, he was a researcher at Boston
Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical school doing work in electronic medical
record data mining.

His abstract is as follows:

It is often estimated that 80% of clinical data today is stored in an unstructured form, mostly as electronic health records. Within this corpus of text lies a vast amount of valuable information that can be leveraged for phenotyping, pharmacogenomic studies, clinical studies, and clinical decision support, ultimately improving patient care and reducing healthcare costs. Until recently, this wealth of information could not be analyzed but with the advent of Natural Language Processing (NLP) it became possible to turn this data into a structured form which can be subsequently used for data mining. In this talk, I will discuss various approaches to semantic analysis of clinical narratives. I will begin by describing a coarse semantic analysis task known as phenotyping. The best-performing approaches to phenotyping currently heavily rely on manually annotated data. I will report on my experiments with active learning, a technique that has the potential to drastically reduce the reliance on manually annotated data. I will then go a level deeper and describe a more fine-grained approach to semantic analysis of electronic health records, which involves discovering UMLS relations between clinical entities. I will conclude with an outline of another relation extraction task which involves extracting temporal relations between clinical events and report on the availability of open-source software for deriving clinical timelines from electronic health records.